Much of David Duke’s ’91 Campaign Is Now in Louisiana Mainstream

State Representative David Duke campaigning for governor in Crowley, La., on Oct. 26, 1991. He lost the election, but his influence remains.CreditBill Haber/Associated Press

By Jeremy Alford

Dec. 31, 2014

BATON ROUGE, La. — David Duke seems a figure from the past, the former Klansman and white supremacist who two decades ago was almost elected Louisiana governor.

But this week when Representative Steve Scalise, the third-ranking House Republican leader, found himself trying to explain why he accepted a speaking engagement offered by a key aide to Mr. Duke in 2002, it was a reminder of the awkward dance and hard choices that Republicans in Louisiana faced in the 1990s when Mr. Duke was one of the most charismatic politicians in the state.

In his 1991 campaign for governor against Edwin W. Edwards, Mr. Duke largely avoided explicitly racial campaigning, appealed to the frustrations and resentments of white voters and won more than 60 percent of the white vote while losing in a runoff election. Two decades later, much of his campaign has merged with the political mainstream here, and rather than a bad memory from the past, Mr. Duke remains a window into some of the murkier currents in the state’s politics where Republicans have sought and eventually won Mr. Duke’s voters, while turning their back on him.

Echoing what mainstream Republicans did during the 1991 race for governor and since then, Mr. Scalise quickly distanced himself from Mr. Duke. Mr. Scalise said he only vaguely recalled his speech, had no forewarning it was a white nationalist group and would have avoided the meeting had he known.

Still, Roy Fletcher, a Baton Rouge-based political consultant who has managed campaigns for Republicans like former Gov. Mike Foster and Senator John McCain, said Mr. Duke may have become a toxic political personality, but he foreshadowed the state’s coming political and ideological shift.

“Now he doesn’t matter anymore,” Mr. Fletcher said. “But politicians here have still co-opted part of his message without having the same baggage.”

Louisiana, like most of the South, has become solidly Republican in a way it was not then, and race remains a fluid issue. The current governor, Bobby Jindal, is a conservative Republican of Indian descent whom Mr. Scalise supported.

Mr. Duke, 64, who now calls himself a “human rights activist,” continues to sell books, a newsletter, DVDs, art and apparel and to speak on racial and cultural issues. He regularly tells audiences he is not a white supremacist and “condemns any form of racial supremacism and oppression.” But he rails against “the ultimate racists, the Jewish, Zionist tribalists.”

During the 1991 race for governor, Mr. Duke attempted to build a bridge between the Klansman he was and the polished politician he wanted to be. He told voters he regretted being “too intolerant” in his youth and said he would not disown his daughters if they brought home an African-American or Jewish boyfriend.

Instead, he focused on anti-big government and anti-tax mantras that preceded the Tea Party movement. His decision to run to the right of the field is now a common maneuver in Louisiana’s open primary system.

Mr. Duke supported forcing welfare recipients to take birth control. Now there are near-perennial attempts by members of the Louisiana Legislature to give welfare recipients drug tests.

After being elected to the state House of Representatives in 1989, Mr. Duke filed nine bills, including measures implementing stricter guidelines for residents of public housing, repealing affirmative action programs and eliminating minority set-asides.

Stephanie Grace, a Louisiana political reporter and columnist for the past 20 years, first with The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and now The Advocate of Baton Rouge, recalled her first meeting with Mr. Scalise.

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Representative Steve Scalise, the third-ranking House Republican leader, is under fire for a 2002 speech to a white nationalist group.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

“He was explaining his politics and we were in this getting-to-know-each-other stage,” Ms. Grace said. “He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage. I think he meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did.”

Mr. Scalise, his Washington staff and political consultant did not respond to emails, texts and phone calls over the past two days. Mr. Duke did not respond to an email sent through his website.

But Chuck Kleckley, the Republican speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, said Mr. Scalise’s conservative values should not be confused with Mr. Duke’s personal statements and actions. “It’s not fair to Steve at all,” Mr. Kleckley said. “He’s a good man, a good father, a good husband and a great person. Ever since I’ve known Steve, he wanted to do what’s right for Louisiana. I never felt like there was any kind of David Duke leanings with Steve.”

Jason Doré, the executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party, said Mr. Duke put it in the awkward position of campaigning for Mr. Edwards, who was later indicted on federal racketeering charges. The slogan, “Vote For the Crook: It’s Important,” caught on like wildfire in 1991. But he rejected the notion that Mr. Duke was somehow the architect of the state’s modern conservative politics.

“A lot of these things the conservative movement had supported, like limited government and a stronger defense, since Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley,” Mr. Doré said. “We already supported a safety net over an entitlement mentality. David Duke did not invent this. He probably co-opted it.”

But if Mr. Duke became a third rail for Louisiana Republicans, some Republicans have seen value in courting Mr. Duke’s voters. When he successfully ran for Louisiana governor in 1995, Mr. Foster paid $150,000 for a list of Mr. Duke’s supporters and received his endorsement during the campaign. Mr. Foster said he never used the list, but it did result in a grand jury investigation and an ethics fine for the former governor after the expenditure was not properly reported.

And despite Mr. Scalise’s own statement on his speech to Mr. Duke’s European Unity and Rights Organization in 2002, its circumstances remain unclear.

Kenny Knight, an organizer for the group and a close associate of Mr. Duke’s, said that he invited Mr. Scalise to speak that day, but to a local group, not the full conference.

But Corey Ortis, who was a Louisiana representative for the organization from 2000 to 2004, said he attended the 2002 conference to hear from leaders of their movement, not Mr. Scalise. Still, from what he recalls of the event, Mr. Scalise gave a 10-to-15-minute presentation that was “the typical mainstream Republican thing” and not “too far right.”

“He touched on how America was founded on Christian principles, Christian men who founded this country, and how it was believed it would go forward as a Christian nation and how we’re getting away from that,” Mr. Ortis said.

Louisiana political experts say the demography of the state’s electorate has played as much of a role, if not larger, as Mr. Duke’s policy ideas in turning Louisiana solidly Republican. Pollster and data analyst John M. Couvillon, the president of JMC Enterprises of Louisiana, said a polarization has taken place to create a black-majority Democratic Party and a solidly white Republican Party.

He said the recent open primary election between the incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, and Congressman Bill Cassidy, a Republican who won the seat, is proof enough. Landrieu carried only 18 percent of the white vote and Cassidy captured just 5 percent of the black vote, Mr. Couvillon said.

In concert with the 225,000 white Democrats who have left the party over the past 10 years, he said it has become very difficult for Democrats to win statewide in Louisiana without significant white support.

Still, he said, Republicans cannot rely on being an all-white party. “That’s the politics of division, which David Duke was good at it,” Mr. Couvillon said, “but it would be a foolish strategy if Louisiana Republicans were to espouse those same principles David Duke did. That’s a legacy best left behind.”

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Much of David Duke’s ’91 Campaign Is Now in Louisiana Mainstream. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe